[Radeon Update] Catalyst 8.7 saves the day!

Ok, the Catalyst 8.7 are out there from a few days and I installed them today. Big surprise! After enabling again DRI the system doesn't freeze! Wow: I'm impressed to be out of the darkness. Let's resume the situation:

+1:

• Installation works out of the box (have to remember to rerun it after each kernel update ;))
• Accelerated X works
• Compiz works (get you transparent windows and video effects)

-1:

• Terrible flickering during windowed video playback (switching to fullscreen gives HW-accelerated, flicker-free video playback though). Workaround exists but it makes full screen quality very bad (large pixels anybody?).
• The small preview thumbnails do not show. That is, when switching with ALT+Tab do, there are small white squares instead of containing the window' thumbnail.
  

About the performances I could not say:

mario@gear:~$ fgl_glxgears
Using GLX_SGIX_pbuffer
18093 frames in 5.0 seconds = 3618.600 FPS
19450 frames in 5.0 seconds = 3890.000 FPS
19352 frames in 5.0 seconds = 3870.400 FPS
19265 frames in 5.0 seconds = 3853.000 FPS
19168 frames in 5.0 seconds = 3833.600 FPS

Anyway, it is enough for a satisfying Compiz experience!

I hope that the minor issues are going to be fixed soon. They are minor glitches but they ruin the ability to fully enjoy this card under the penguin.

Catalyst 8.6 + Linux + 8Gigs of RAM = Crash

To introduce just another chapter in my neverending fight to have a working system, I'm going to tell you about how I've been able to make by Ubuntu Hardy (8.04) box start (yeah: no freeze!) along with my new Radeon HD 4850.

I previously owned an nvidia GeForce 7800 GTX 256M an decided to change it to enjoy more recent games: at 135,00 € the Radeon was too big an attraction. The bad things did happen when I tried to start X after following this guide to install the latest 8.6 drivers (supporting the new Radeon 48XX series cards). I followed step 2, rebuild the .deb packages and installed them. Restart X and ... freeze! Hard reset needed. From there on several ours went on googling, searching forums and reading bug reports and trying any possible solution:

• disabling the SMP with maxcpus=1 (maybe some concurrency lock? Difficult since there the crash occurs deterministically bu you never knows ...)
• reducing the visible amout with mem=2048m (maybe some overlapping among memory and I/O addressing?)
• disabling 3D acceleration (also if I'm pretty sure it isn't used by GDM but maybe some strange initialization hard locks the machine ...)

Nothing.

Though, I'm pretty sure that it is a combination of 64 bits CPU, 8G of RAM and the ATI drivers. Before giving up, I came over a bug report: essentially the users complained about the same hard freezes as me and the only way they could boot was by disabling DRI altogether, that is by adding:

Option "no_dri" "yes"

in your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file(video card device section).

The good thing is that you finally have a working X. The bad thing is that there is no HW acceleration and dragging windows is sluggish, at best. Hope that ATI is going to fix this because I can live without OpenGL under Linux but dragging windows around is a so common that such behavior can't be accepted. Perhaps I should switch back to NVidia, since their prices are going down.